Five Minute Briefing - July 1, 2015

NEWS FLASHES

Dell is releasing a series of updates to its Toad family of database solutions that will continue to prioritize managing data across a variety of platforms. The latest round of updates to the Toad family of solutions enables customers to automate agile development practices, improve data preparation for analytics and reporting, and gain flexibility in selecting database platforms, according to Dell.

The concept of shadow or stealth IT in organizations is not new, but it is a topic that is becoming more relevant. According to Gartner's IT Glossary, shadow IT "refers to IT devices, software and services outside the ownership or control of IT organizations." As IT professionals, what is our role in shadow IT? Is shadow IT good or bad for an organization?

Oracle announced more than two dozen new PaaS and IaaS services spanning database, Java, integration, analytics, compute, storage, and networking services. "We are now prepared to call our platform and our infrastructure services complete," said Oracle executive chairman of the board and CTO Larry Ellison during the launch event. A key tenet of Oracle's cloud strategy, said Ellison is to offer the same technology on-premise and in the cloud "so you can easily move your data and applications back and forth."

THINK ABOUT IT

By and large, it seems like today's IT professionals belong to one of two camps: either traditional on-premises IT or the cool, new age cloud. Sometimes, it can even seem like we are talking about two different species. After all, for many of us who come from the client-server era, cloud can be intimidating. Even worse, it can be a source of real anxiety; becoming obsolete is a constant risk in an industry that evolves as fast as ours.